Thursday, September 3, 2009

eBay Sales for Julia Child and Cookbooks Are on the Rise by Terapeak

From 1961 until her death in 2004, Julia Child was a celebrated American chef who brought French cuisine to the masses. In 2002, then-unknown Julie Powell created a blog titled The Julie/Julia Project, which detailed her attempts at all 524 recipes from Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking collection.

And in 2009, Nora Ephron made a movie about the two. Titled Julie & Julia, the film, which stars Meryl Streep as Child and Amy Adams as Powell, opened #2 at the box office, earned a glowing review from The New Yorker, and has so far grossed more than $70 million worldwide.

It’s also sold a lot of cookbooks.

Really, this is one of those merchandising fall-outs that should have been predicted a mile away — and surely hundreds of savvy book-sellers out there are congratulating themselves on stocking Child’s best-seller. Of course, many of these crystal-gazers do their business on eBay, and the following results speak for themselves. Just check out these 30-day All Sites trends for “Julia Child” — first Total Sales, then Average Price:

The latter graph, in our opinion, is the far more remarkable one: it tells us there’s extreme demand for Child’s books, which her publishers can’t reissue fast enough.

As for Child’s effect on “bigger picture” eBay sales, you can see in the graph below that total sales for “cookbook” in general have enjoyed a marginal increase over the past 30 days (probably less marginal that it seems, considering that’s a trend based on on nearly 75,000 listings):

Going forward, it’ll be interesting to see if cookbook sales continue to climb, and whether demand for Child’s recipes peters out as more books become available. (The upcoming holidays add even a further wrinkle.)

Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have some Beef Bourguignon to go whip up! - Terapeak

Terapeakis an eBay Certified Provider and a member of the eBay Market Data Program. Terapeak 5.0 is a web-based solution providing real-time market research and data analytics on eBay. Terapeak 5.0 provides eBay sellers and buyers with two years worth of trending data.